COCOA (an acronym derived from COunt and COncordance Generation on Atlas) was an early

text file A text file (sometimes spelled textfile; an old alternative name is flatfile) is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists stored as data within a computer file system. In operat ...

utility and associated file format for

digital humanities Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or Information technology, digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanitie ...

, then known as humanities computing. It was approximately 4000

punched card A punched card (also punch card or punched-card) is a piece of stiff paper that holds digital data represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Punched cards were once common in data processing applications or to di ...

s of FORTRAN and created in the late 1960s and early 1970s at

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...

and the

Atlas Computer Laboratory The Atlas Computer Laboratory on the Harwell, Oxfordshire campus shared by the Harwell Laboratory was one of the major computer laboratories in the world, which operated between 1961 and 1975 to provide a service to British scientists at a time ...

Harwell, Oxfordshire Harwell is a village and civil parish in the Vale of White Horse about west of Didcot, east of Wantage and south of Oxford. The parish measures about north – south, and almost east – west at its widest point. In 1923 its area was . Hi ...

. Functionality included word-counting and

concordance Concordance may refer to: * Agreement (linguistics), a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase * Bible concordance, an alphabetical listing of terms in the Bible * Concordant coastline, in geology, where beds, or la ...

building.

Oxford Concordance Program

The

Oxford Concordance Program The Oxford Concordance Program (OCP) was first released in 1981 and was a result of a project started in 1978 by Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) to create a machine independent text analysis program for producing word lists, indexes an ...

(OCP) format was a direct descendant of COCOA developed at

Oxford University Computing Services Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) until 2012 provided the central Information Technology services for the University of Oxford. The service was based at 7-19 Banbury Road in central north Oxford, England, near the junction with Keble Ro ...

. The

Oxford Text Archive Oxford Text Archive (OTA) is an archive of electronic texts and other literary and language resources which have been created, collected and distributed for the purpose of research into literary and linguistic topics at the University of Oxford, E ...

holds items in this format.

Later developments

The COCOA file format bears at least a passing similarity to the later markup languages such as SGML and

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable ...

. A noticeable difference with its successors is that COCOA tags are flat and not tree structured. In that format, every information type and value encoded by a tag should be considered true until the same tag changes its value. Members of the

Text Encoding Initiative The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a text-centric community of practice in the academic field of digital humanities, operating continuously since the 1980s. The community currently runs a mailing list, meetings and conference series, and main ...

community maintain legacy support for COCOA, although most in-demand texts and corpora have already been migrated to more widely understood formats such as TEI XML

References

{{Reflist Digital humanities Computer file formats History of software Markup languages